The number of websites on the web or Internet has grown to billions. Efficient ways to find the important websites and information on the web are becoming more and more important to users. Internet search engines including Google™, Ask.com™, Yahoo!™, and MSN™ use different methods to search the web efficiently. Web searching has become an important part in Internet users' everyday life. It has huge value in bringing information to people.
Various algorithmic web search techniques still have many shortcomings. Google Technology, Inc. uses the PageRank® and Hilltop methods in its search engine. The method ranks websites according to hyperlinks between websites. It uses the “power method” to find the eigenvector of the so-called teleportation matrix. The eigenvector gives the ranking of the websites. To ensure convergence, a teleportation parameter equal to 0.85 is used. It has been reported that the PageRank method gives different result when different teleportation parameters are used. Another algorithmic search method, the ExpertRank method used by Ask.com™, also solves an eigenvalue and eigenvector problem. The method does more than just identify pages with useful information about a topic, which is called “authorities.” The method also looks for pages that contain many links to pages with useful information on the topic, which is called “hubs.” The assumption behind this is that the most authoritative pages on a given subject will be those that are most often pointed to by other pages.
Existing algorithms are susceptible to link spam, wherein spam websites improve their ranking by creating a lot of links pointing to their websites. In addition, some existing algorithms penalize large web domains that have a large amount of interlinked websites.
It would be desirable to find websites with great content and websites with many weighted inbound links. It would furthermore be desirable to encourage webmasters to maintain their website and remove spam links.